Saturday was the second day of the Dartmouth Carnival weekend taking place in Stowe, Vermont. The events were 3 x 5 kilometer skate team relays for both men and women. It was another beautiful – if cold – day on the Morton designed courses at the Trapps Family Lodge, where 42 teams from 12 EISA schools toed the line. After the first leg of the men’s relay it was race-favorites Middlebury and Dartmouth out in...
American hopes for a medal in the men’s 10k biathlon sprint fell about as hard as the snow did in the middle of today’s race. 25 minutes into the event, the steady drizzle that came down throughout the morning morphed into a wild snow squall, slowing the skiing drastically and effectively squashing the chances of anyone still on course. The medalists in the race—France’s Vincent Jay, Norway’s Emil Hegle Svendsen, and Croatia’s Jakov Fak—all were...
Editor’s Note: Portions of this article were removed at the request of the US Ski Team, which believed that sensitive information included in the piece could impact its medal chances. FasterSkier does not generally grant such requests and will not do so in the future, and we would not have done so if we believed the material in the article to be of critical import to the skiing community. While we did not agree that...
Whistler Olympic Park, BC – Organizers of the cross country races here have been using a lot of salt recently. And it’s not because they’re hungry. With rain and above-freezing temperatures for the last few days, officials have been experimenting with ways to harden the courses. Today, FIS Cross Country Race Director Jurg Capol said, organizers tested salt on the portions of the courses that will be used for the 10/15k freestyle on Monday. And...
Breaking two bones in your hand a month before the Olympic Games doesn’t sound like good preparation. But it sure didn’t hurt Anastasia Kuzmina. Shaking off an early miss, as well as the injury she suffered in early January, the Russian-turned-Slovakian won her country’s first Olympic medal in biathlon—and its first-ever gold in the Winter Games—on Saturday in the women’s 7.5k sprint. The announcers characterized Kuzmina’s win as a surprise, but her win comes after...
While his Canadian teammates were out marching in front of their home crowd in Vancouver at the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Olympic Games, Devon Kershaw was alone, 60 miles away, watching them on a “fuzzy, little, little screen.” Kershaw got a small consolation prize, according to his Twitter feed—seeing his girlfriend, Chandra Crawford, a few times on that tiny television. But his decision to stay near Whistler was one faced by dozens of athletes...
As far as coaching goes, Magnar Dalen has been around the block. Formerly the head coach of the Swedish team and head wax tech for the Norwegians, Dalen has been in charge of the Finnish program for the last four years. When Dalen took over Finland’s team in 2006, the women were already strong, with Virpi Kuitunen and Aino-Kaisa Saarinen finishing sixth and 12th in the World Cup overall the year before. But the men’s...
Due to insufficient snow cover at the Dartmouth Cross Country Ski Center, the Carnival weekend has been moved back to the site of last weekend’s races: the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, VT. The cold temperatures, wind chill, beautiful tracks, and blue skies with sunshine are also a repeat. But the icing on the déjà vu cake: Franz Bernstein of the University of Vermont and Ida Sargent of Dartmouth were again the classic champions. This...
The FasterSkier team has arrived in Whistler for three weeks of reporting from the 2010 Olympic Games. We will be bringing you live and in-depth coverage of every event on the program for cross country, biathlon, and nordic combined. We’re staying in Whistler village, roughly half an hour from Whistler Olympic Park (WOP), where all of the nordic events are taking place. We spent yesterday getting our feet under us, while today we are in...
Over the weekend I traveled to Minnesota for the City of Lakes Loppet. On Saturday night I raced in the city sprints and on Sunday I did the 33km freestyle loppet. The race started at Theodore Wirth Park, crosses the lakes in Minneapolis and finished downtown.
After winning a World Cup competition in Dusseldorf in December, Russian sprinter Alexei Petukhov was asked to describe the source of his strength in the post-race press conference. For most other skiers, the answer would have been simple: training, talent, good technique. But for Petukhov, with four of his Russian countrymen banned from the sport over the past year for doping violations, it was a tough one, and he addressed the issue in his answer....
Nordic ski enthusiasts from around New England and beyond converged in Woodford, VT on February 6th for the 2010 Prospect Mountain Olympics. Clear blue skies, comfortable weather, and a deep snow base with beautifully groomed, packed powder on top made for a super day of skiing. More than 180 skiers participated in a variety of events for all ages. The opening ceremonies began with Prospect Mountain Bill Koch League coach Bob Fisher skiing down from...
Fast and Female held an event in downtown Canmore on Saturday afternoon. Led by defending Olympic Gold Medalist in the sprint, local Chandra Crawford, the event was very well attended. Main Street Canmore was covered in snow and groomed for skiing. The festivities started with a speech by Chandra and continued with a dance warm-up by the internationally renowned Drum Café. The 80 girls then played assorted ski games on Main Street. Kikkan Randall and...
The König Ludwig Lauf is held every year on the first weekend of February, and is known by the local people by it’s nickname, “Luggi”. It is the most popular race in Germany and this year marks it’s 38th running. It is part of the Worldloppet, Euroloppet, and DSV cross country skiing series. The race is run from Oberammergau, a small village in the Bavarian Alps of South Germany, right near the border of Austria. ...
Light snowfall and intermittent gusts of winds combined with cold temperatures to make for less-than friendly spectating, but that did not stop the crowds from clustering at trail junctions to cheer on the more than 400 racers that participated in the second day of racing for the combined UVM college carnival and Eastern Cup weekend at Trapps Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont. Both men’s and women’s races were run with two rounds of the same...
Stowe, Vermont — Saturday, February 6 On a perfect winter day at Trapp Family Lodge, the Stowe Nordic Outing Club hosted the region’s very best cross country skiers for the TD Bank Eastern Cup and University of Vermont Winter Carnival. The collegiate skiers proved themselves against the Eastern Cup field today with Dartmouth’s Ida Sargent winning the women’s race and UVM’s Franz Bernstein taking the men’s victory. Heather Mooney (Stratton) was the top non-collegiate finisher...
They were ideal conditions for a classic race. Cold – but not too cold, blue skies, sunshine, and precision cut tracks. Luckily, these were also the type of conditions that could withstand a lot of racing traffic, as the college carnival was also combined with an Eastern Cup and the total number of participants numbered more than 450. Designed by Morton Trails, the race venue at Trapps Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont is in the...
In the men’s classic sprint in Canmore on Saturday, there were all kinds of tactics in play. In the women’s version, there was just one: go like hell, and leave everyone else in the dust. That was Justyna Kowalczyk’s M.O. today. Using the massive engine she’s developed by racing every event in her path, the Polish dynamo crushed her competition in every single heat she skied on Saturday. In the final, she had more than...
With a thin international field here contesting the classic sprint in Canmore, for the world’s best, Saturday morning’s qualifier was just a formality. From here, the stage is set for a knock-down, drag out series of heats on what the U.S.’s Torin Koos called a “strong-man’s course.” 1.7k long and striding-heavy, the difficulty and length of the new sprint loop in Canmore will make for a tough, tactical afternoon. “Nobody’s going to want to put...
For the last few weeks, Justyna Kowalczyk of Poland has been training five to six hours a day. Seriously. We asked her four times, just to be sure. Granted, she said that only three to four of those hours were skiing—the rest were in the gym. But it’s still a lot of volume in advance of a World Cup. Kowalczyk’s approach to her training underscores athletes’ varying strategies during this final period leading up to...